A. Field
The present invention relates to an electronic device and a method of making the electronic device, and more particularly, to incorporating a functional block into an area on a substrate that is outside of a display area on the substrate and incorporating a barrier to protect a display medium that does not cover the area where the functional block resides.
B. Related Art
While the present invention has many aspects and embodiments, this section will focus on those aspects that relate to display devices. While there are a large number of various different types of flat panel display devices, one very common flat panel display device utilizes pixel electrodes to control a display medium such as a liquid crystal display (LCD) layer in order to create an image. These pixel electrodes may control other types of display media such as electrophoretic display media, organic light emitting diodes (OLED), or a polymer light emitting diode (PLED). Typically, a pixel electrode works by creating locally an electric field relative to another electrode. A display medium is sandwiched between the two electrodes and reacts to this electric field. Such display device can be an active matrix display or a passive matrix display such as those used in modern laptop computers, televisions, smart cards, or cellular phones.
In most of the flat panel displays, two glass plates are being used for carrying functional layers such as electroconductive layers for pixel addressing and color filters. A display medium is sandwiched between these two glass plates. The display medium can be liquid crystal compounds for the LCDs, and light-emitting polymers for OLEDs or PLED. The assembly including the two glass plates and the display medium is typically referred to as a display cell. In most case, foils are laminated to the outer surface of the glass plates to improve the image quality.
Glass plates tend to make the display brittle, inflexible, heavy, and difficult to handle.